Memorial to the murdered Jews of Orsha

Память убитых евреев Орши / Памяць забітых яўрэяў Оршы

A memorial in the Belarusian industrial city of Orsha is dedicated the city's murdered Jewish children while a memorial from Soviet times commemorates the victims of the mass shootings of 1941.

History

Orsha, located at the fork of the Dnieper and the Arshytsa rivers near the Russian border, was first mentioned by name in 1067. Jews lived there from the 16th century onwards and at the end of the 19th century they made up more than half of the population. On the eve of the Second World War about 8,000 Jews lived in the city.
The German Wehrmacht occupied the city on July 16, 1941. About one third of the Jews had managed to flee to the East, while many Jewish men were drafted into the Red Army. The Jews who remained in the city had to wear identifying badges, hand over their valuables and conduct forced labour. At the end of August, Einsatzkommando (sub-group of Einsatzgruppe) 8 of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) B murdered 43 Jews in the forest near the village of Ponisovye. The remaining Jews from Orsha were crammed together in what is today Friedrich Engels Street in the western part of the city. In about 25 houses fenced with barbed wire, approximately 2,000 people had to live in a confined space. Caused by hunger and the miserable living conditions, a typhoid epidemic spread in the ghetto in the following months, killing many. In addition, the inhabitants of the ghetto suffered under the arbitrary violence of German and Belarusian policemen.
In September 1941, members of the Einsatzkommando 8 drove hundreds of Jews to a pit at the mouth of the Arshytsa into the Dnieper and shot them there. On November 25, 1941 the Security Service of the SS (SD) under Obersturmführer (Lieutenant of the SS) Reschke took command of the ghetto. On November 26/27 the ghetto was dissolved and its inhabitants murdered save for 30 skilled workers. The Jews were driven by German and Belarusian policemen to the Jewish cemetery, where members of Einsatzkommando 8 shot them. At the beginning of October 1943 the Sonderkommando (special unit) 1005 arrived in Orsha, whose task was to destroy the evidence of the mass shootings by opening the mass graves and burning the bodies.

Orsha, undated, Historic view, public domain

Orsha, 2009, Obelisk at the shooting site, Arkadiy Shulman

Victims

At the end of August, members of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B shot 43 Jews, accusing them of sabotage and communist activities. About one month later Einsatzkommando 8 shot about 800 Jews in Orsha. 2,000 Jews were confined into the ghetto, many dying of hunger and disease. On November 26 and 27, 1941 members of Einsatzkommando 8 shot all the Jews of the ghetto. In the days that followed all children from Christian-Jewish imxed marriages were murdered. According to the Soviet Extraordinary Commission, which investigated the occupation crimes after the liberation of Orsha, a total of approximately 6,000 Jews might have been murdered in Orsha.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland the north-east of the country was annexed to Soviet Belarus. In summer 1941 the whole of Belarus was occupied by German troops. Over the next three years between one in four and one in three residents met a violent death. Almost all of the towns were completely destroyed. The Wehrmacht or SS systematically annihilated around 620 villages together with theor inhabitants, including Chatyn. The largest extermination camp on occupied Soviet territory was located in Maly Trostenets outside the Belarusian capital Minsk. It is now presumed that at least 60,000 German and Belarusian Jews were murdered there. Up to 85,000 Jews are estimated to have died in Minsk and 230,000 in the country as a whole. From 1941, Belarus was at the heart of the Soviet partisan struggle against the German occupation with over a thousand active partisan groups. The Red Army began to recapture the country at the end of 1943 and the German occupation was considered over by summer 1944. The country was largely destroyed, the society shattered and the people traumatised. Belarus was reincorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944. A large part of the Polish territory annexed in 1939 remained part of the country. National memorial and memory culture in post-war Belarus were dominated by the liberation of the country on 3 July 1944 and the day of victory on 9 May 1945 as the end of a »heroic« struggle in the Great Patriotic War. Memory of the partisan war was also of key importance. The genocide of the Jews was not mentioned directly in the Soviet republics. An obelisk put up at the »Yama«, a pit where mass murders took place in the Minsk ghetto, was therefore an exception in the former Soviet Union. It was erected as early as 1946 and for decades was the sole memorial with a Yiddish inscription and a direct reference to the murdered Jews. The memorial site at Khatyn is also unusual. Here,153 people were burnt alive in March 1943. The memorial site, established in 1969, is notable for its simplicity, its concentration on the human dimension of the plight of the victims amidst the horrors of war and the absence of monumental features otherwise common in the former Soviet Union. After Belarus claimed independence in 1991 the search began for an independent national identity. The number of victims plays a decisive role, especially those killed during the Second World War. However, there is consciously no distinction drawn between the territorial situation of the country pre- and post-1939. Both the crimes of the Stalinist regime and the Holocaust have come to the fore but the nature of the state has prevented public discussion of these aspects. State remembrance continues to be dominated by the war in the years 1941 to 1944. Its main symbol is the monumental new building of the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, opened in 2014. In the meantime, however, the association of Jewish communities in Belarus has established a series of memorials to the victims of mass murder. Since the early 1990s, several German towns have also put up stelae in Minsk to remember the Jews deported and murdered there. The Berlin stele, financed by the federal state of Berlin and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, was inaugurated in an official ceremony on June 25, 2009. There is also movement with regards to a fitting development of the Maly Trostenets area: In 2015, a memorial complex was inaugurated at the site. A second segment which was co-financed by Germany was opened in 2018 by the presidents of Belarus, Austria and Germany. Germany has also pledged to finance the renovation of the Historical Workshop’s historical building on the former territory of the Minsk ghetto, documenting the fates of its victims.

Remembrance

The Red Army recaptured Orscha on June 27, 1944. Only a few of the city's Jews had survived the Holocaust. Some had managed to hide among the inhabitants or to cross the front lines and flee to the interior of the Soviet Union. Still others had joined the Red Army or partisan units. After the end of the war some Jews returned to Orsha so that in 1970 the city's Jewish population numbered up to 1,000 again. After the end of the Soviet Union many Jews emigrated from Orsha and Belarus.
The Jewish community erected the memorial on the site of the mass shootings of November 26 and 27, 1941 in the Jewish cemetery in 1968. The memorial stone and the obelisk are surrounded by a white fence. The Russian inscription on the obelisk reads: »Soviet citizens are buried here, perished at the hands of the German-Fascist invaders«. In a grove next to the cemetery there was another memorial stone. It was replaced by a new monument in 2014 erected by the Union of Belarusian Jewish Community Organizations together with the Jewish community from Orsha. It is dedicated in Belarusian, English and Hebrew to the Jewish children from Orsha, murdered in November 1941.
In 2005 the Jewish community in Orsha regained the building of its synagogue from pre-war times. Today it also takes care of the preservation and care of the Jewish cemetery on Friedrich Engels Steeet and is involved in the restoration of memorials in the surroundings of Orsha.

Orsha, 2009, Memorial stone at the shooting site, Arkadiy Shulman

Orsha, 2009, Mass shooting site, Arkadiy Shulman

Open

The memorials are accessible at all times.

Contact

Friedrich Engels Ulitsa
211030 Orscha

Orsha, Beginning of the 20th century, Old Synagogue, public domain

Orsha, 2009, Earlier memorial to the murdered Jewish children of Orsha, JHRG

Orsha, 2009, The ghetto was located on Friedrich Engels Street, Arkadiy Shulman

Orsha, 2014, New memorial to the murdered Jewish children of Orsha, Belarus Holocaust Memorials Project

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